and the history books forgot about us
by tore-my-yellow-dress
Summary: She likes to pretend that this will last. Lizzington. Spoilers for the Luthor Braxton arc.


**A/N- A positively disgusting dose of mush and angst. I don't know. I don't know what's wrong with me. Blame the new promotional pictures. Blame RedandLizzie on tumblr because she's the best influence ever for me to write my heart out for this ship. This one is for you, lady! Disclaimed. Enjoy!**

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_Cut his hair myself one night; a pair of dull scissors in the yellow light. And he told me that I'd done alright and he kissed me 'til the morning light. You are my sweetest downfall and I loved you first.—Regina Spektor_

* * *

/

Hibiscus-scented suds sleuth down her calves and waste into the drain.

For a moment, she closes smeared eyes and allows the scalding heat to beat down upon the apples of her cheeks. The day threatens long, too long; the muscles of her shoulders spasm and keen where the water manages a cheap-man's therapy, and truth be told, she misses hands that are wide and able. She misses, and it's been a long day because the energy it requires to pretend everything is whole far outweighs any chasm, any bridge with mortar and brick, any distance in miles. The foundations crumble when he's gone.

Lizzie is soaking in the rise of sensational comfort and letting her mind wander to how she will spend the upcoming Valentine's Day, what Samar was saying about a new endorsement for the interagency connections, the byline The New York Times ran this morning. All the little things. Senseless pressings. She's dazing when she hears it: oh so quiet, creaking.

A door opening. _Her_ door is opening. A shake resonates through the apartment, rocks the aqua shower curtain, a frame resounding, wood on wood. Lizzie's pale back goes ramrod straight, and she inhales. Sharply.

But she does not turn off the water, find her gun. Simply shifts her stance.

"Hello?" she calls out. "Who's there?"

She knows, then and there, that if this was a horror movie, she would inexplicably be slaughtered. But this isn't a cinematic feature. This is her life. And her life begins and ends with a dark figure to appear in the doorway. Liz tries to make out the face through the fogged mirror's vague reflection, but everything is steam, and she can't.

Lizzie squints, clears her throat.

But see, she _knows _before his voice even crawls through the pitter patter of water.

The soft animal within her knows that he's here before he even speaks out. _It's the work_, she tells herself. _Working together in such close proximity will do that._

"It's me," Red assures gruffly. He sounds tired.

"Hey," Lizzie stammers. And even if Lizzie's still covering her uncovered, soaking breasts with cupped hands, everything in her relaxes on impact, on confirmation. A smile tugs at the corners of her lips, despite the situation. "You're back early."

Lizzie tries to curb any internal reaction to stop like a frozen opossum in the middle of her shower, determined, reaches any arm out to grab a bottle of Pantene. The shower curtain hangs staunchly. A wall of blue between platonic and whatever it actually might be.

"Things went well," he tells her, but there's a note in his tone that's more than doubtful.

"Too well?" she inquires, intentionally keeping her voice light while she works the conditioner through her hair.

He does not respond.

Seconds pass in a dizzy churn, and Lizzie stops carding through locks, arms floating to pull lank at her sides, residue from the product lingering. "I'll be out in a moment," she offers up, a part of her thinking the silence means he could have even left to make coffee.

Imagines him sipping a cup of delicately tan liquid, what with the milk, and creamer, and sugar. The way he likes it. Sweet. The way she knows he likes it. He knows where everything rests in her apartment, these days. _Work hazard_, she tells herself. _Work._

Lizzie moves to turn off the water when a blur of motion in her peripheral makes her startle, coughing.

Air drafts in.

"Red, Jesus. You scared the—

But she stops when she watches him pick up each foot, cross the distance to stand next to her. Lizzie does not scream. Lizzie does not cover herself. Instead, she takes every inch of him in like his body holds an image from long ago, kings and castles. Like something holy, the way the lines of him draw, the way his chest rises and falls deeply, tides, the way his eyes are green and of the ocean today.

Just them and their nakedness. Violent delights are these.

Lizzie breathes out. Red reaches out a beckoning palm, and then he tugs at her forearm, makes her leave the rush of spray to fold into his embrace. Rosy nipples tickling his chest hair, her wet lips at his neck. Lizzie breathes in. That first rush of cologne makes her weep, not jostled by the washing clean, almost as much as Red's flurry of kisses pressed into her forehead, her cheeks and her nose. Finally, her mouth. The slip of his tongue between her lips makes her moan, and he responds kindly to the sound, pressing her tighter against him. It makes her toes curl, nails digging into the porcelain of the tub.

"Missed you," she chokes savagely when they part.

The thing that people don't know about Raymond Reddington is that despite being of average height, the firm whetstone of his body offers strength of men a half a foot taller. His arms are encompassing, sturdy. Lizzie feels so small with him, smaller than she'd ever felt with others before. He is her guard dog in the back yard, the gun beneath her pillow when she goes to sleep every night. To see him shaken is not a settling vision.

And to her words of sentiment, he has said nothing. Only stares, eyes level. Stares at her so intensely, unfathomably dark emotions creeping. He is still holding her just as tightly. So tightly it hurts. He is hurting.

Somehow, something has made him hurt. Or afraid. Or desperate.

Or all three of those things.

Lizzie shivers, then. Comprehends that the water can't possibly extend for so long. She leans in, chastely pecks just shy of his mouth. "I'm finished," she tells him softly, "so let's dry off and talk about—

Red cuts her off by driving them both against the wall, abruptly enough that she nearly loses her footing. "Red," she gasps, "Red, what are you—

The shower wall is shockingly frigid. Even as he begins to suck at her pulse, baring his exquisite weight so that she can feel his erection at her thigh, Lizzie squirms. "The water."

"I'll pay your bill this month," he hushes against her skin, an aside, torn in two from the cadence.

"Red, tell me what's wrong," she pleads with him into the shell of his ear, even as he hitches one slippery limb around his waist, grinds into flesh so that she breaks off and scrunches her features into a grimace of pleasure. Missed. She's missed. And she opens her mouth to tell him so.

But he's gone to work on inclining his head and teasing her breasts, fondling them and making her feel good, so good, and it all feels so good, what with the way he bites at one pert bud before sucking hard, and the water has dripped down his head, into his nose and eyes, and she can't see his eyes, and that's what's the matter. That's what's wrong with this torrid, beautiful, beast of a burden.

"Raymond," she uses his given name. One last resort. "Ray, please."

She knows, more than she knows many things, how it guts him to hear her call him that.

Red finally, reluctantly, addresses her. He pulls back to look at her. He looks in pieces, and he tells her, growls, "Lizzie, I need you."

There's a difference between want and need. They know this. They established this months and months ago, that first night when he had _wanted_ to take liberties and she had said, _yes, yes, take the whole country and make an anthem of this wreckage. Call us freedom_, she'd said. _Call us hope._

But he says _need, _and he bends to position them, and Lizzie would do anything to make him not hurt. That's the crux of the matter: Lizzie would do anything for him, if he asked.

And he'd do anything for her, too.

Die for her. Live for her.

Maybe both.

Lizzie says nothing else in response, just understands, she understands better than anyone, but she tilts her hips so that he can fill her to the hilt, press inside her so deeply that they really don't know where one ends and the other begins, and it's perfect. She kisses _him _whole and deep, clinging to the wide berth of his shoulders feeling the scarred beauty of his back because he needs her, and she needs him to be okay. Her fingers dance along the scars of his allegiance as he makes love to her body like she is gospel, like the monsters are at their door and everything is burning, and the only truth is the way they fuck.

The water goes cold.

They do not care.

/

She loves most the domesticity of evenings when he stays with her in the little apartment with the broken heating and no microwave. The Concierge of Crime cramming himself into a tiny bathroom. One sink between them. She blow dries her hair to tame and he shaves, a towel hung low on his hips the only decency between them. She loves most the way they can watch each other so close; the way she can pretend she's any other thirty-year-old having an affair with a man twice her age, the way he can pretend he's a normal person that deserves peace instead of blood.

It's so easy to pretend that this will last.

She unplugs the chord from the outlet while he finishes up, and when goes to wash the hairs from the sink she distracts him, sly and fluid, by slithering between him and the counter, framing his smooth jaw with both hands, and claiming his lips. Red grunts in amusement, plays with the chestnut hair that he so often thinks is a halo around her face.

"Again, Lizzie?"

"Yes," she whispers, all confidence, parting her legs and scooting back so that the laminate digs. Tugs the towel aside, takes his hot flesh in her hand. He smothers his laughter into her neck. Intimacy, speakeasy sinking into her pores. He never disappoints her.

Most men would be jealous of Raymond Reddington for this fact.

/

They go to bed together.

Unfortunately, this brings the darkness clawing. They don't bother with clothing. The light of a ceiling fan leaves so that the white of the moon streams in through barely parted blinds. He tugs the unmade covers back and sinks down, but despite her's being the right, she climbs into his lap, straddles him. This is not a sexual thing, although it could easily be. Red senses her goal, and lays back.

She manages to rest ear against his beating heart just as he tugs the blankets up around them, taps the bones of her spine. Strokes her hair. He sighs deeply, wrought with exhaustion.

Somehow, though, she knows sleep will not find him quickly.

Here, alone, they talk.

"You say this man had ties to Luthor Braxton?" she starts, the name heavy in her mouth.

"In a roundabout way," he answers, licking his upper lip. In the half-light, she watches his brow furrow. "I know I should have brought this before the task force, Lizzie. I know you had your reservations. In my opinion, it was easier to handle things efficiently without disclosure."

He pauses, frowns deeply. "But I need to keep in mind, that regardless of the immunity deal, _you _still have a duty to that agency, and regardless of what we are, I shouldn't have informed you I was even—

"No, Red. Stop. I'm glad you told me," she nods, reassuring, smoothing a hand across the coarse hair of his torso. She frowns, too. "Last week, when you said this was a Luthor Braxton in the making, I overreacted."

"Considering the facts, you didn't," he mutters so sternly she flinches.

His expression softens, and he touches his thumb to her chin soothingly. Adoringly. "You had basis, Elizabeth. We both know what happened with Luthor. I'm sorry that I was so crass in comparing this fledgling to that particular Blacklister. Similar methods, yes. But worlds apart in capability of damage inflicted."

Everything is halted as they remember, relive.

"You know," Lizzie murmurs, blues of her eyes waning. "When I think about Luthor, my first thought isn't the way he took my mind out and played with it."

Red tenses visibly.

"It's not finding out you'd set the fire that killed—

She breaks off, shaking her head and continuing, steady. "It's not the way he broke something between us, and the wake of destruction those realizations left. It's not even brute strength, when the motherfucker slapped me across the face."

Red's eye twitches in a familiar mannerism, his orbs dull but shining against the fractured bright. "Elizabeth," he says, weak.

"It's before I was taken that I remember most," she goes on anyway, sniffling regardless of her promises to herself, and pressing her ear harder to his beating heart. That memory so strong, waking, and she needs to be reminded as she says the words. "After the bomb, when you were lying there. You wouldn't wake up, and I _thought_ you were—

Lizzie tosses her head, meets his eyes directly and doesn't feel shame when tears leak hot and fast down her cheeks. "Thought I'd lost you. It was the first time I understood that if you died, a part of me would die with you."

He holds her as she's wracked with tremors, kisses what he can. He does not tell her it's going to be okay, because he's trying his damnedest not to lie to her these days. It's hauntingly familiar to the treatment of booboos, these emotional and psychological scars. After a minute or so, Lizzie clasps a hand over her mouth to muffle the noise, to quiet down. When she does, he speaks swiftly:

"I'm sorry for how rough I was with you in the shower."

She comes to attention, shifts and stares, everything blotchy. His face is hard, serious. Lizzie looks at him and imagines how he must have been at twenty, thirty. She knows this valor did not merely come with age. "Red, that's okay."

"No," he stops her, puckering his lips wryly. "I told you Portia wasn't Braxton because it's the truth, but then I got myself worked up and ignored my own advice to you in the process."

At that moment, his stomach, flush beneath her, releases an audible, splitting growl.

Any words at his lips dies. Lizzie's gaze widens.

Then, pins him.

"Red," she says slowly, every ounce of a mother she hasn't been seeping through her tenor. "When was the last time you ate?"

"Around noon," he answers, shrugging and physically interrupting her in the process of checking the clock.

Lizzie groans when she catches the time. "Don't bullshit me, Red. Noon in _Romania. _It's eleven-thirty at night. With the time difference, you haven't eaten in at least, what? A day?"

She spills herself off of him, moving to stand, before he snatches her wrist, keeping her there. "Lizzie, please. Just call takeout. My pants are in the bathroom, phone in my trouser pocket, I—

"No," she tells him, point blank.

She's probably one of the few people in the world that can actually tell him _no. _

"Lizzie—

"Red, you know what the doctor said. Your numbers suck. Now, let go of me so that I can make you some—

He does, reluctantly, and when Lizzie flips on the bedside lamp, his illuminated, soured expression is so akin to that of a little boy that she almost stays to kiss him silly.

"This could be my cheat meal," he pouts.

Fun fact: Raymond Reddington knows how to _pout. _

"Ray," she murmurs in reproach, shaking her head and rummaging around in a drawer for a gown to toss over her head. "If I ask Dembe, I'm sure he'll say you've already had your cheat meal this week."

He grumbles something extremely rude associating Dembe with hens as she's leaving the room. "I heard that," she throws over her shoulder, grinning madly.

/

She has a package of turkey bacon in the fridge that she bought for him, but she doesn't end up utilizing that. Maybe it's because she's feeling particularly wrought with weight when she reaches for the bread, for the cheese. Maybe it's because a weeks ago, Red confided in her his fondest childhood memory. Maybe it's because she needs comfort food, and feels badly that Red has to bare through her turkey bacon and egg whites most mornings, instead of his preferred five star banquet at the Bussidio in midtown.

Ten minutes later, Lizzie saunters through the door, a warm plate in her hands.

Red makes a noise in the back of his throat. "That was quick."

Then he realizes. "Cheese toast? That's definitely not—

"Shh. I'm being nice. Don't spoil it," she hushes him, shaking her head fondly and sinking onto the mattress beside him. He's sat up against the headboard, and in the yellow light, the wistful gleam in his manor is so present. He picks up one of the two pieces and bites into it, humming under his breath.

"Good?" she whispers, pressing a kiss against the underside of his jaw.

"Very."

/

He'd told her the meal was from his childhood, and it was.

The thing he didn't tell her is that he'd make it for Jennifer every Sunday before he left.

One day, he'll tell her that too.

But instead of that tale, the one that bubbles to his lips as he's finishing the crust of the second piece is, "I kept asking them where you were."

Lizzie takes the plate and it clangs against the bedside table noisily. Pays the utmost mind to the way his mouth is a thin line, the way he doesn't flick of the light, but pulls her across his lap instead. Fingers drifting to support her lower back. "I remember thinking that I'd told you to go, and you wouldn't. And nobody could tell me where you were, but I kept asking, anyway. Almost hysterical, really. I just knew—

He stops himself, Adam's apple bobbing. "I had once watched Luthor Braxton slaughter innocent victims, people I'd only spoken to once, meaningless connections. And you are my world. I just knew he'd—

He stops again, kissing her squarely, surely. "I was terrified, Lizzie. I was terrified for you. I'll never forget the taste of that fear in my mouth. Only Dembe knows this," he says against her skin, breath fanning out on her cheek, "but when I got away from everyone else, to the car…"

Liz's face is bloodless, listening. Her heart aches for him.

"I was sick all over the sidewalk."

Everything is silent, after that. There's nothing to say.

She flicks off the light, and he reaches for her, pulls her beneath his body.

Outside, people go on about their lives, and it is so easy to pretend, in moments like this: his hands pressing her into the bed, his pelvis at the perfect angle. Together, entwined. It is so easy to pretend that Aram and Ressler and Samar know, and that everything is alright even if she was supposed to catch a criminal and ended up making him her lover instead. Pretend that there's a ring on her finger, a baby in a crib. This a home. This is their home.

It is so easy to pretend that this will last.

/

In the morning, like every morning, she makes her coffee black and bitter.

All alone in the tiny apartment.

.

.

.

_fin_


End file.
